Charles Cross captained The Rocket, Seattle's monthly rock newspaper, during the era when Nirvana played Seattle Vogue club before a handful of people and you could eat breakfast next to Eddie Vedder at the original Cyclopes Café up the street from the Seattle Art Institute. Overnight, Seattle and the Northwest had gone from being a backwoods that turned out national stars roughly once a decade (in the '60s, the Kingsmen and Jimi Hendrix, in the '70s, Heart) to a music hub like New York or Los Angeles. The Rocket gave way to The Stranger, and Cross went on to pen articles in hundreds of magazines, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Spin, and Guitar World, as well as author of seven books, including Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (published by Hyperion, 2005). Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain (Hyperion/Hodder, 2001), was a New York Times bestseller and was called "one of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star" by Los Angeles Times. In 2002, Heavier Than Heaven won the ASCAP Timothy White Award for outstanding biography. Cross's other books include the national bestseller Cobain Unseen (Little Brown), Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music (Harmony, 1989); Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell (Harmony, 1992); and Nevermind: The Classic Album (Schirmer, 1998). In 2004, while conducting research for his biography of Jimi Hendrix, Cross rediscovered the gravesite of Hendrix's mother, Lucille Jeter Hendrix, in an abandoned section of the same Seattle memorial park her son was laid to rest. Cross delivered a moving eulogy for Lucille when a proper headstone was dedicated at the site.

Universal Pictures has acquired the rights to Heavier Than Heaven, which is the first film to be made from Cross' work. His Hendrix book has also been optioned. The University of Puget Sound hosts Cross and his thousand stories Thursday night. 

CHARLES CROSS, 7:30 p.m., Kilworth Chapel, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner, Tacoma, free admission, 253.879.3366